One of the greatest is the acts of genocide
Stalin carried out against the so-called “punished peoples” by forcibly
deporting them from their homelands and leaving them to die in the wilds of
Central Asia or elsewhere. His actions in the North Caucasus and Crimea are
well-documented; those elsewhere much less so.

One of the nations Stalin deported
that has received only sporadic attention are the Kola Norwegians, a small group
who settled in the northern reaches of Russia in the 19th century,
prospered but then were deported in the lead up to World War II and were never
allowed to return.

They have been given some attention
by Norwegian investigators – their story is even summarized on a Wikipedia page
– but the Kola Norwegians have seldom attracted Russian investigators.Now that has changed with a remarkable
article this week on their history and fate (russian7.ru/post/kak-kolskie-norvezhcy-stali-russki/).

Although the article is entitled “How
the Kola Norwegians Became Russian,” it concedes that “to come to Rus does not
mean to become part of it.” And it makes clear that this community stood apart
and viewed itself as separate until its dispersion by deportation led to its
disappearance.

The Kola Norwegians came for Finnmark,
settling n the Murmansk shore where they played a major role in the development
of fishing and trade with the Pomors. In Murman itself, the article says, “no
one lived until the end of the 19th century.” As the Russian
authorities “did not control this territory,” the Norwegians arrived and
settled initially without reference to them.

But by 1859, they had become
sufficiently numerous and tsarist power in the region had grown enough to
appeal to Aleksandr II and receive permission to settle along the entire
coastline, in large part because unlike Russians who didn’t want to settle
there, the Kola Norwegians asked for no state assistance.

The only condition the tsar placed
on them was that the Kola Norwegians had to become Russian subjects.After doing so, their economic situation
improved still further both from fishing and from the production and sale of
alcohol to the Pomors and the local Russian communities that had begun to form.

By the end of the 19th
century, the Kola Norwegians numbered more than 2100.After the revolution, they organized a
fishing collective farm; and despite the Soviet state’s confiscatory approach
to it, “their standard of living was much higher than that of Russians and
Finns” in the region.

They kept apart and had a cautious attitude
toward Russians and all things Soviet, and not surprisingly few Russians
settled among them and the authorities viewed them with suspicion. The NKVD
began lodging charges against them and by 1938, a quarter of the Kola
Norwegians had been repressed.

Then, in 1940, on Stalin’s order to “cleanse”
all border areas of “alien elements” in the name of national security, the
Soviet organs deported the rest to various parts of the Soviet Union.“In this way,” the article says, “the history
of the existence of the Kola Norwegians in Murman came to an end.”

Because
they were sent in small groups to regions and republics far from their
homeland, the Kola Norwegians either died out or were assimilated. They “surfaced”
again only after 1991 when Norwegians from Norway visited the Murmansk area looking
for records of their ancestors and set up a monument to them.

But
by that time, there were no Kola Norwegians left; and in 2007, the Russian
authorities took the final step in their disappearance by declaring vacant Port
Vladimir which a century earlier had been their largest settlement.